Evaluation Questions

1. In what way does your media product use, develop and challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

For more detail on the ways in which we used, challanged and developed forms and conventions for our promotional advert and digipak click this link http://graveneymedia3666.blogspot.com/2010/01/analysis-and-evaluation-of-digipak.html

2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?



3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

To view the recorded audience feedback we gathered, click here http://graveneymedia3666.blogspot.com/2010/01/audience-feedback.html

4. How have you used new media technologies in the research, planning, construction and evaluation stages?

During my research I found a lot of help to be gained from the use of the internet and my computer. Through fast search engines such as ‘Google.co.uk’ I was able to search for and locate exactly what I was looking for with ease, for example when looking for background information on the artist ‘KT Tunstall’ I typed in the keywords ‘KT, Tunstall, Suddenly, I, see’ into the search box which brought up a host of results and I found what I was looking for(The genre her music was classed as) quickly and efficiantly from the result for the website Last.fm which is a popular music site, I later referred to this site on numerous occasions for similar queries on other bands. Having such fast search results like this allowed me to be a lot more productive with my time and able to do a lot more work in a shorter space of time and gave me more time to focus on the rest of the project.

When trying to establish what the typical conventions are that are used in ‘Indie’ Music videos I used the websites YouTube, Yahoo Music Station and Google video to search for and view music videos of this genre, to do this I used the facility of looking at videos in terms of their genre which ranged from metal to r&b; Becuase of this I was able to find out that Indie videos usualyy have a fast cutting pace and have frequent close ups of the artists, they also usually have a strong narrative running with the video, we encorporated all of these into our video. Searching by genre also helped as I was not only limited to looking at the bands I was familiar with but could get a broader, more accurate idea of what the conventions were for use with our own video.

While streaming the music videos in the online players I found it very useful in the way I could pause, rewind, fast forward or watch as many times as I wanted. This enabled me to go back and pick up on things that I may have missed on a first viewing, say on a music television channel such as MTV2 it also saved time through not having to wait for commercials.

I was also able to use Windows Vista’s, Snipping Tool, application to capture specific areas of a moment on screen and as the JPEG file format which is the perfect format to use when uploading pictures to my blog. Having this feature also meant I as able to capture preicse images from a video and email them to my group members, for example I found a scene from a music video set in a forest which I showed them and we all liked. I also used this while analysing all the music videos but especially when looking at the song Misery Business by the band Paramore, I saved numerous images from the video for further analysis so I could make my point clear with examples of how the video portrayed typical American High school stereotypes such as the bullies and also the strong female lead singer.

When we were looking for a band to use, I used the worldwide social networking site Myspace.com, which is also famous for its music section which allows bands, signed or unsigned to publish their music for online streaming as long as it’s in the MP3 file format. This proved helpful as it saved a lot of what would have been wasted time contacting bands with copy write music where the likelihood they would refuse our request.

I again searched for bands via genre and set it to indie/rock, this saved a lot of time as I didn’t have to go through lots of bands that weren’t of the genre I was looking for. I sorted my results by popularity which gave me the list of most popular bands in this section, from this I discovered several bands, one of which being ‘Futures’ where I was able to listen to their song ‘16’ and send a message to the band using MySpace’s inter-messaging facility, this saved us time having to find an alternative contact method and also allowed us to keep an easy track of messages sent and received by possible bands.

During all staged of production my group needed to be able to keep in constant contact with each other and have the capabilities to send and receive files within the school network, To achieve this we used the website ‘Fronter’ which is a personal login space where members of a school are linked and can share files. This helped us a lot as our normal everyday email accounts such as ‘Hotmail’ cannot be accessed from the school, I also used my fronter email address to sign up and create a YouTube account, my blog, SlideShare and more.

When blogging I preferred to use my home computers word processing software, Microsoft Word 2003 as the formatting options were a lot simpler and more familiar than that of blogger. To publish my posts in the same format and layout, like I did with the analysis of KT Tunstall’s music video to Suddenly I see, I used the website SlideShare.net which is a document hosting website where users can share document, slideshows etc with the word in exactly the same way it is presented in their software, the site best handles documents with the file extension ‘.doc’ which is what my software saves documents as which was helpful, it kept all images and text in the same places this saved me having to reposition everything if pasted into blogger.

Once my file was uploaded I was able to embed the document into a blog post on my blog page using HTML(HyperText Markup Language) code; the code of which is provided when you upload documents.

When researching music adverts in magazines I found myself in possession of hard copies of some which I needed to have as an electronic copy. For this I used my flatbed scanner at home to scan the images in, in high quality onto my computer and then upload it to fronter where I could have access to them wherever, this helped as I didn’t have to worry about being too careful with the original in fear of it getting scrunched up or torn. I could also using my photo viewing software to zoom up on the images and see more close up details usually undetectable at a glance, this helped as I was able to put in more detail into our magazine advert especially on the forest so when examined closer the detail can be seen.

I also had some digipaks which I needed to have pictures of on my computer, I tried to scan them in, but failed, due to the thickness of the albums letting in light inside the scanner and disrupting the picture, to resolve this I used my compact digital camera, Kodak M340, to take photographs of the albums such as one by the band ‘System of a down’ entitled’ Mesmerize’ and have them on the computer again in high quality ready for analysis. Having virtual copies meant I could take the pictures with me so that I could study the layout of them in depth wherever I was and also show my group what I had found so we could all confer with each other, we were then able to make a group decision on how we wanted the digipak and magazine advert to be.

When constructing we were able to get feedback on certain parts of the video in advance so that we could edit it early, for example we uploaded two versions of the landlord scene from the video to YouTube and asked for feedback which we received, having it online enabled us to get a diversity of opinions and not just those of the people we ask who could be biased, we were also able to show the scenes to anyone wherever we had an internet connection allowing us to get feedback wherever. Also when we gathered feedback online for our main video we didn’t ask a specific question on the video, this meant that misinterpretation of the question couldn’t happen and that we could gather feedback from all aspects of the video for example some of the feedback we got refereed to not only the narrative but the performance and end editing as well.

During the construction process I used the new media technology of different file formats to allow portability of my product, in this case being able to export video clips from iMovie in an .mp4 file format which is what iPods can play. This enabled me to see what I’ve got went out filming or what we needed to get, for example it helped us when we were out filming I had the animatic on my iPod which we could use to give an idea of timings for scenes in the video and as a sort of video style shot list, this sped up the filming process and made the construction a lot smoother. I was also able to export the video as a .3gpp and then use Bluetooth technology to transfer it wirelessly to my mobile phone, being wireless it saved the hassle of cables and installing drivers.

In my evaluation stage I have been again able to use my compact camera to record video of myself with sound answering the three other evaluation questions this helped me express the evaluation a lot better and when editing it enabled me to input screenshots so I could easily refer to specific scenes in the video or other medias directly, for example when I talked about the “I Wish” signs I was able to show an example.

On the whole all the the new media technologies I used with my production proved to be very helpful and primarily saved a lot of time which made the whole project easier to manage.

Final Digipak & Magazine Advert with Analysis and Evaluation

Digipak

Panel One:

On the front cover we chose to have an real photograph of the artist featured in the video in front of a pencil drawn background. The drawings give the album a child like feel which we also hoped would give the audience a sense of simplicity about the album. The background scene is similar to that of which is seen in the opening of the video and because the forest is where we first saw the artist we thought it would be appropriate to have the same thing on the front cover.

We used the same font throughout the Digipak and Magazine advert displaying the band name ' The Joy Formidable' we got the font style from a website called www.dafont.com

We displayed the font in a vibrant red colour for the album title, we used this colour because it stood out from the rest of the cover and would draw the potential buyers eye to it. We also aimed to get their attention though the obvious contrast between the reality of the girl and the fiction of the background to achieve this we also had the girl centered. This was also a theme we used in the video of fantasy and reality which we incorporated into both ancillary texts.

We named the album 'Broken Panes' We did this because our reoccurring motif through the video was Things breaking. We used the word 'Panes' as in to be said out loud as if it was referring to Pain, but meaning Pane like a window pane which is linked to the frame breaking in the video as it resembles a window.

The positioning of every item on the cover is crucial as if positioned incorrectly could take away its importance for example the bands name 'The Joy Formidable' is placed at the top giving it a sense of authority and stature over the other parts. The girl centered in the frame is again crucial as it gives her, the lead singer, most attention as she is the main focal point of the cover.

Panel Two:

The second panel is of the same foreground details from the previous panel except with a brick wall in the background. We did this because we wanted to show a progression to a more concrete/urban setting as the panels would be seen. The panel has no information on it, we did this because we didn't want to take way the impact of the details of the picture so focus could be drawn on it under closer inspection; this helps give the audience a sense of satisfaction that they have bought something that is worth more than they originally thought.

Panel Three:

The third panel is very similar to the previous one expect with more focus now on the concrete background becoming more prominent than before with the tree's now gone and replaced with mere branches.

Panel Four:

On the back cover we kept to a conventional layout which has the track listing, barcode and artist name. Once again we kept the same font going, we did this because on the magazine advert this font is used and any potential buyers will recognise the album when out by the similar font and images used. On this panel the concrete setting has fully come through leaving no sign that there used to be a forest there. In our video we have shots of the lead character holding up a sign saying "I wish" which synchronized with the lyrics, we put this in as a form of intertextuality and as if to tell the audience, I wish things were back like they were(in the forest).

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Magazine Advert

We kept the magazine advert very much like our originial ideas keeping the layout the same as that of a conventional magazine advert which we established though our research.

Like in the digipak we have the artist name at the top and the album name directly underneath it, this we found was typical of adverts as it gives the key information at the top which is where the audiences eyes will hopfully first initially go.

We put the rest of the important information at the bottom incased within a black box with the information in white font. We did this so that the writing would be more prominant against the black background, we also put mimial writing in as we found through our own experience that when looking at an advert you dont want to be staring at it and trying to search for the main information thats why we made ours simple and to the point but also complex when examined further.

We have the same image of the girl on this as we did on the digipak, this is so that people will be able to recognise the album when out shopping by remembering and associating it with the advert.

Audience Feedback

We gathered lots of feedback from a wide range of sources including video feedback which I've embedded from YouTube below

We also received feedback from our teachers on our first version of the music video which is shown below.